Which is more intelligent, the dog that fetches the newspaper from the front yard or the dog that runs away as soon as the door is opened? Is the dog that earns its food through obedience and affection smarter than the cat that offers neither but gets its food anyway? Is a chimpanzee that creates a tool to extract termites from their mound cleverer than the anteater that uses its claws and snout to achieve the same goal? It is impossible to answer these questions without defining intelligence and to assess a specific animal’s intelligence we must separate it from human intelligence. Our natural urge is to anthropomorphize animals in order to judge their intelligence; an animal that learns to press buttons in a laboratory in order to get food is seen as more intelligent then one which refuses to participate in the experiments of its captors. This concept is not so different when defining […]